The DU Lounge

“Do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows”

All my life I keep showing up to a banquet. The banquet is made of nature, science, learning, love.
I did not make the banquet, yet it keeps amazing me with its deliciousness:

Delicious fruits from the labor of others. I live in a house i didn’t build, eat food I didn’t grow, read books I didn’t write.

Delicious displays of natural beauty: The bird that caws as it glides overhead in invisible currents. The light entity that danced in the trees one evening in puzzling, glistening, evolving ovals while we slowly figured out that it was coming from scraps of light reflecting on the water onto the old trunk of a tree (a tree we had named Hobbes, whose backside still bore the scars of a lightning strike). Water — what a rich substance it is, simple but elegant, powerful or gentle, scarce or pervasive, solid, liquid to swim in or drink, mists, fog that feeds the redwoods, clouds, snowflakes, glaciers, and divider of light into rainbows.

Delicious morsels of physical reality turned into knowledge, through the painstaking research of brighter minds — Like: the seasonal migration of birds may rest on light-activated “crypto-chrome” proteins to produce radical pairs of electrons, entangled pairs that are much longer lasting and are [link: Magnetoreception |hyper-sensitive] to the minute electromagnetic fields of planet earth.That last fact was assembled into the bank of human knowledge by quantum physicists like Klaus Schulten in the 1970s, ornithologists like Scott Wiedensaul, and Henrik Mouritsen who found the cryptochrome molecules. And the good folks at Radiolab, who brought the story to my 62-year-old ears, as beautiful of a story to my ears as…

Specific voices still in my memory have poured into my ears like honey, like love, like the voices of childhood, like the voice of the mourning dove as it cooed and purred outside my modest childhood home, which always recalls to me the spirit and love of my mother, gone now for 37 years.

Leonard Cohen sung ‘Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’. Leonard Cohen, and whatever spirit flowed through Bruce Springsteen to capture so eloquently the blending of tragedy and holy sacrifice of the firefighters in the lyrics of The Rising:
Sky of blackness and sorrow (A dream of life)
Sky of love, sky of tears (A dream of life)
Sky of glory and sadness (A dream of life)
Sky of mercy, sky of fear (A dream of life)
Sky of memory and shadow (A dream of life)
Your burning wind fills my arms tonight
Sky of longing and emptiness (A dream of life)
Sky of fullness, sky of blessed life (A dream of life)
Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine

And the soul that breathes through Sweet Honey in the Rock (“I don’t know how my mother walked her troubles down.. I don’t know how the angels woke me up this morning soon / I don’t know how the blood still runs thru my veins / I don’t know how I rate to run another day / Standing in a rainstorm I believe. My God calls to me in the morning dew / The power of the universe knows my name / Gave me a song to sing and sent me on my way / I raise my voice for justice I believe)

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I deserve none of these great blessings, have earned no such extravagance as a world full of birds, and water, and music, and math, and quite a large number of beautiful souls. Not to mention babies (innocence), four year olds (angels incarnate), very old people (living portraits nearing completion) and puppies (joy). Yet here we are. Life as we know it is full of what seems impossible. Look up at the sky as the great migrations occur; you may witness a migratory miracle. Like the 8,300 mile nonstop flight of a Bar-Tailed Godwit, which flapped its way for 11 days over the Pacific Ocean from Kikigak Island in Alaska to Ansons Bay Tasmania near New Zealand, just 4 months after it hatched. It seems impossible, and oddly, its migration depends on quantum mechanics to navigate.

Where does the great migration of human souls go? We who believe in facts and science avoid taking things on faith. But science can’t explain where time goes, either. Why we move forward in time, but not backward. What is outside of the box we live inside of? Do the godwits disappear for good, like it must seem in Alaska each December? Or do they reappear — the same birds — after a long journey across the ocean? At 1 month or 2 months, they may struggle to toddle around, but at 4 months, they fly 8,300 miles.

Here’s a message in a bottle: “Dear fellow human ape. When you are watching the birds leave, pick up a phone and FaceTime to converse with someone in India, or Japan, or Tasmania. Easy, right? You could wait 11 days, before you call Tasmania, and ask if they’ve seen your godwits yet. After you walk around in space this way, through the magic of internet, walk around in time. Pick up a different phone, and talk to your great-great-great-grandfather, and tell him his progeny survived far into the future — whatever the future is, since now it is just another dimension. You can’t walk around in time? Only forward, not backward? Humans won’t invent that, but we didn’t invent magnetoreception in birds, either. It just developed on its own.

To make the universe understandable to humans, it had to be fractured into billions of people, run rampant in a long experiment. A condition both temporary and permanent. You can’t understand this now, because you are trapped in time, but one day that changes. Your little 3D printers put down one thin layer at a time, do they? The intricate machinery of quantum physicists at a blackboard and ornithologists standing in watery fields didn't happen overnight, to build up knowledge acquired in bites understandable to a 3 pound human brain. Creation and invention poured out over the millennia. All this beauty, knowledge, learning and love.

I don’t know what it all means. It is undetermined, maybe indeterminable. It ain’t all for nothing, I think. After 60+ years, in spite of all the bad in the world, I am chronically aware that the depth and intricacy of beautiful life are endless. In darkest hours, in brightest hours, there is meaning. Mumford & Sons sang ‘“Are you afraid / However could you not be / In this rosy light/ This is strange / I feel a hand come through the mirror / Pointing at the light / Point at the light we never see / As you put your feathered arms over me / We'll sit and talk the stars down from the sky / And I'll not forget the chaos in your eyes love / And as you leave / You must know you are beloved”

Human emotions are too big for the human heart to hold. Human knowledge is too big for one human mind, but collectively we have something greater than we have alone. Are we fractured light, waiting to be made whole again? It seems implausible, but the miraculous earth carries less plausible realities than that.

In my father’s house, there are many mansions — billions, maybe. Wander around, you have all the time you need now, outside of time. It will seem familiar, with the people and places and ideas you loved, still nearby. When a circle translates along a line to be a cylinder, or around a ring to a torus, it doesn’t stop being a circle exactly. You never were 3 dimensional anyway. You were already an infinite series of humans, from beginning to end, a 3-D person translated across the 4th dimension of time. At the end, we think ‘now you are complete’. Life may surprise you one more time. You were always connected, like islands under the water.